


A Version of the World: A Tale of the Sixth Bookkeeper

by Geonn



Series: The Bookkeeper's Archive [7]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Original Work
Genre: Books, Bookstores, Gen, Lesbian Character of Color, Major Original Character(s), Time Lords and Ladies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 07:34:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geonn/pseuds/Geonn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The little shop had never been there before and looked quite dodgy. It could have been dangerous, it could have been deadly, but it was definitely a bookstore. How could she resist?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Version of the World: A Tale of the Sixth Bookkeeper

Of course it would have to be raining. She couldn’t have waited until the storm passed to have the argument, couldn’t have decided five or ten more minutes in the relationship were worse than pneumonia. She tugged on the strings of her hood and tried to stay close to the buildings so she could be protected by the awnings. She knew the weather would have just been another excuse to delay the inevitable. She and Noelle had been spreading further and further apart since last November, when Noelle made one lame excuse after another before finally revealing she didn’t want to go home for Christmas because “my parents don’t exactly know about you.”

At first Amira thought the issue was that she was a girl, but it quickly became apparent that Noelle’s parents were fine with her being gay. Their issue would be with the fact that Amira’s parents were from one of the “bad countries.” She couldn’t believe race was such a big issue, but Noelle was adamant. There was no way she was bringing home someone she would have to defend constantly.

“I can take care of myself, you know.”

“I know, I know, but it’s just... a lot, you know? It’s just easier to stay home.”

“So I’ll never meet your parents?”

“Is it that big of a deal?”

Amira had been forced to concede it wasn’t, but it absolutely was. How could there be any future for them if she had to be hidden away like some shameful secret? Noelle’s parents had been pushing her to find a nice young Bangladeshi boy, but they had taken the revelation of their daughter’s blue-eyed brunette girlfriend in stride. The only downside was that now her mother emailed or texted every time Ellen Degeneres was in the news, but it was a small price to pay for acceptance. 

Noelle’s reluctance to reveal their relationship had been the base for everything else that had been going wrong. Tiny frustrations mixed in with it like she was stirring a stew, adding bits (left the bread on the counter) and pieces (is it so hard to take out the trash?) as they appeared. Finally, in the midst of a torrential downpour, Noelle’s latest crime was to leave her boots on the carpet after going out to get something from her car. Amira had stepped in the resulting puddle in her socks, and the ensuing fight had led to her angrily deciding that she didn’t want to live in an apartment with soggy floors. 

Ten minutes and four blocks later, she wasn’t regretting the decision so much as the timing of it. Why couldn’t the final straw have landed on a sunny day? She tried to bury her hands deeper in her pockets as she rounded a corner, her shoulders up near her ears, hoping her roommate was willing to overlook the whole “moving out” thing to let her come back. 

At the corner she stopped to check traffic, soaked to the bone, and her eye landed on a small shop tucked in the last lot on a dead-end street. She was absolutely positive it had never been there before, but she had a hard time remembering what had been there. It hadn’t just been an empty field, right? There had been... trees? No, not trees. It was completely unassuming, unconcerned with attracting clientele, but she could see stacks of books in the windows. A shingle in the shape of an open book swung over the door but didn’t bear the name of the establishment.

She was walking toward it before she realized she had decided to see if it was open. The door was recessed, so at least she could take shelter if the door was locked. It was an old-fashioned brass tubular door handle and the thumb latch gave no resistance when she pushed down on it. She opened the door just a fraction and stuck her head inside. It was incredibly warm and inviting, with shelves crammed full of books standing at unexpected angles. The area around the entrance was the only cleared space, and a counter to the left should have held some sort of cash register but was instead piled high with more books.

“Hello? Are you open? The door was unlocked, and I didn’t see any sort of sign saying you were closed...” She stepped inside if just to get out of the cold. She shook the water from her hands as she shrugged out of her jacket and used the dry portions of the hoodie underneath to wipe her face. She took a few steps into the store and folded her jacket so that the wet part was on the inside. She had already dripped enough on the floor to feel horrible. The least she could do was buy a book to make up for the hassle of cleaning it up.

“Is anyone here?” The place was surely small enough that anyone in the shop would have heard her first call. She was starting to feel odd being in a place of business without anyone official present. “I’m just gonna take a look around, all right? Just browsing until the storm lets up.”

She stepped into the space between two shelves, turning left at random and moving slowly down the aisle. Almost immediately she was confused by the inventory. The spines constituted an entire rainbow full of colors, including some combinations she couldn’t quite name. The titles and author names were written in every language; she identified Cyrillic and Spanish and... were those hieroglyphics? She took one of the unidentifiable books off the shelf and flipped it open. The words inside were English, and she vaguely understood the context, but beyond that it seemed to be pure gibberish.

She put the book back on the shelf and continued deeper into the shop. As she browsed she tried to figure out the filing system. It didn’t seem alphabetical, or by subject, or country of origin. She reached the end of the aisle and turned right, finding herself in a completely different section. These books all seemed much older and much more mysterious, the kind she expected to find in a private home or a museum. Except in those places they would probably be much less dusty. One entire shelf was sheathed in a veil of cobwebs so diaphanous she could barely see through it.

At the end of the row, nestled between two large books that formed a tent over it, she found a goldfish swimming in an incongruously crystal-clean bowl. She bent forward the stared into the water, drawing the fish’s attention for a second before it went back to aimlessly swimming in circles. She reached out to tap the glass, but then she remembered all the aquariums she’d visited in the past that said not to do that.

“What kind of bookstore is this?” she whispered.

Ahead she saw that the aisle branched off in three different directions. Amira started down one at random, a thought ticking at the back of her brain for a full minute before she could articulate it. She stopped in the middle of the aisle, reluctantly pulled her eyes from the shelves, and looked back the way she had come. She mentally retraced her steps and realized that she should be in the middle of the shop next door to the bookstore. She walked back to the crossroads of aisles, went in a different direction, and followed it to the end point. 

There, in the negative space between shelves, was a cozy little reading nook. Two extremely plush armchairs that just begged to swallow her up, each flanked by elegant end tables where she could rest a cup of hot cocoa. The only thing missing was a nice fire, but somehow she suspected a fireplace was hidden somewhere among this labyrinth. That thought connected to another, much darker realization.

She didn’t exactly have the best sense of spatial dimensions, but she knew that the front entrance had to be at least fifty yards behind her. There was no way the shop was that deep. If she had walked fifty feet from the front of the shop she would be on Dunthorne Avenue. She reached up and touched her hair, which had dried in the time she’d been in the shop. Her coat also felt dry, and it made her suspicious of how much time she had lost in the stacks.

“All right. Enough mystery for one day.” She started toward the front of the shop but... wait, had she turned right or left when she entered the stacks? She would have to reverse her decisions, but she couldn’t remember if she had passed this intersection or changed direction. Panic was starting to rise, but she forced it down, only making herself more stressed. She finally started recognizing landmarks and started jogging, eager to get out of the shop before anyone appeared.

Unfortunately, her luck seemed to be staying its course. She had just entered the cleared space at the front of the store where every aisle seemed to converge when the front door was thrown open to let in a burst of cold, wet wind. The man who rode in on the gust was tall, broad shouldered, and had a wild wig of hair that flopped wetly in his eyes as he pushed the door shut behind him. He wore a navy blue military jacket with braids across the chest, looking like a refugee from Sergeant Pepper’s Naval Academy as he approached one of the support beams. He slapped his hand against the side and a panel fell open to reveal some sort of computer interface.

“Absolutely and completely _wrong_. Wrong as in not correct and not the natural order!” His accent was South African, one of the best accents in her opinion, and she eyed the door to gauge her chances of getting out before he saw her. He continued his rant as he pushed buttons on the display. “When I expect something I expect it! I do not expect the unexpected because how could I, eh? Got you there, didn’t I? Lousy piece of hold on. Curious. There’s a curiosity.” He stopped and spun around. He had a long, narrow face with a rounded chin, his thick eyebrows knotted together in confusion. He jabbed a finger at her. “Who are you? You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I...” She gestured lamely at the door. “The storm. I couldn’t go home because we’d had a fight, my girl and me. And I saw the shop and... well... couldn’t pass it up.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I could have you arrested for trespassing!”

“It’s a shop, though. Isn’t it?”

“Yes, a shop without a proprietor present, which makes it closed, which makes you a burglar. And yet you still came in. Why?”

“It was warm. It was dry.” She shrugged. “It’s a bookshop. Who can pass up a bookshop?”

His face exploded into a grin. “Right answer! What’s your name?”

“Amira Naser.”

“Pleased to meet you, Amira Naser. I’m the Bookkeeper. You can call me Book.” He spun on the ball of his foot and half marched back to the console. “Sorry for the outburst when I came in, but there’s nothing worse than showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course that has quite a different meaning for me than it would for you. Wrong time for you means five or ten minutes early or late. Wrong time for me means that I have to find a millisecond in a haystack of centuries.”

“Right.” She drew the word out until it had more than a few extra syllables. “So. Um. I’ll... just get going.”

“What now? You don’t want to leave two hours from now when the rain has stopped?”

She laughed. “Well, the thought of spending two hours in a bookshop is kind of an ultimate fantasy, but um.” She pushed a hand through her hair. “I should probably get home. Find out if I even have a home.”

“Woof. That sounds ominous.”

“Well. You make a big deal about moving out, then move in with someone who might not really want you there...” She sighed. “Sort of stuck in the in-between-y.”

Book laughed. “Aha! I love the in-between-y. It’s where all the fantastic stuff happens. All right, there you go.”

“There...” She suddenly realized the front windows were full of sunshine, beads of rain still trickling down the glass. “What? I thought you said the storm wasn’t going to end until... not that you’d know, of course, but... that storm was still going strong!”

“Yeah, for another two hours. Well, hour and forty-eight minutes, but close enough.”

Amira stared at him for a long moment. “Who are you?”

“Told you. I’m the Bookkeeper.”

“Right. And what is this place?”

“It’s my TARDIS. It’s how I get from place to place.”

Amira shook her head. “But it’s a shop. Shops are stationary.”

Book nodded. “Usually. Not this one. In point of fact, this one just scooted ahead one hour and some-odd minutes so you could get home out of the rain. Or.” He turned and rested his hand on the console. “And that is a very important or.”

“What comes after it?”

“An option. A choice. You asked who I was, and I gave you an answer. A partial answer, and here is the rest. I’m the Bookkeeper, and this is my TARDIS. I use it to travel through space and time because I’m a Time Lord. I use it to find books. Old books, lost books, apocrypha and hidden writings. I thought it dropped me off on a completely random street on a completely random day. But then it let you in. It doesn’t do that lightly.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat. “It has a choice?”

“Oh, yes. More than I do, sometimes.” He glared at the console and then sighed. “But I’ve learned to trust its instincts. You came in because you couldn’t pass up a bookshop. You probably think reading is an adventure, right? A way to leave your humdrum life and go gallivanting around the stars. That’s what you were looking for when you came in here from the storm.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Then that’s what I’m offering you. The story of a lifetime. Danger. Excitement. Maybe a little romance...? Who’s to say? All of it right here at your fingertips if you so desire.”

Amira walked to the door and looked outside. The rain was indeed gone, leaving the sky clear and empty. She didn’t understand how that could be possible unless the impossible man was telling the truth. She looked at him again.

“Time travel.”

“Yes.”

“So I could come back tomorrow.”

“You could come back five minutes ago.”

Amira moved closer to the console, peering over his epaulets at the screens. “I could go back a month, set up a new flat. Give myself somewhere to live.”

“Thinking ahead. I like that.”

“And when we’re not mucking about in time, we’d be...”

“Doing missions for the Librarian. Think of a number, the biggest number you could ever think of, then double it. Because as long as humans have had pens, they’ve been writing down stories. True stories, false stories, ballads, operas, epic poetry, histories and romances and mysteries and stories about what their dog did that day. Bawdy jokes and hymns, pastorals and war epics. The stories are out there and we’re going to find them.”

Amira pursed her lips. “I only have one question.”

“Just one? How boringly uncreative of you. Fine. Ask.”

“Can we read them?”

Book blinked at her. “Read them? Unearthed stories, stories that have never before been seen by human eyes?” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Of course we’re going to read them, don’t be silly.”

She held out her hand. “I’m in.”

“Fantastic!” He slapped his hand down on the console. Out of the corner of her eye Amira saw the windows at the front of the shop faded into a strange pale gray. “Next stop, a week ago so you can find somewhere to call home, then off we go.”

Amira chuckled, then let it grow into a full-fledged laugh. She didn’t know if he was insane, didn’t know if she was insane for going along with it, but she couldn’t wait to find out.


End file.
